I also take your point about human choice, as far as it goes, but I still think Soylent is a special case.

If I eat ridiculous amounts of pesto and rupture my duodenum, nobody would hold the pesto producer responsible, because that's not the way people eat pesto.

But if eating lots of Soylent made me ill, Soylent's makers should, in principle, bear some responsibility, because they know that this is how people eat Soylent. Indeed, Soylent was heavily hyped as something that could be 100% of your diet, and they can't pretend that never happened.

The FDA actually DOES require that novel ingredients are tested to the point where 0.1% problems are detectable. I know that the algae isn't a novel ingredient, but if Soylent add it to their formula, it will suddenly comprise a large part of the diet of a large number of people. That is a novel thing in itself, so I would argue that Soylent has some responsibility to make sure what they're doing is safe. If FDA rules say its okay not to, the FDA rules need to catch up.

I might be inclined to give Soylent the benefit of the doubt if I thought they had a better attitude. But when they made themselves sick because they forgot humans need selenium in their diet, they didn't say, "Wow! How could we have been so dumb? We need to take more care with people's bodies." It was more like, "Hey, no problem. Nobody died and we fixed it now. Let's move on."

These are just the screw ups we know about. What are the odds there are plenty more they managed to hush up? Nobody has been killed or injured so far, but if they don't change their attitude and people continue to live off their swill...